6 Life Lessons Learnt from Packing
Recently I’ve had to pack my life into boxes, and I realized I’ve done that at least eight times in the past decade (AUS dormitories required us to clear the room every year so that partly explains the bloated number), but still…I realized that the process of packing can teach you a few life lessons if you pay attention to it.
1) One box at a time. While some people are into last-minute packing, I started one week before and just packed one box at a time. That made the task less stressful and daunting.
I don’t know who came up with the question in the picture above, but my immediate answer whenever I hear, “How do you eat an elephant?” is usually, “First tell me, why would you want to eat an elephant?”
But this elephant thing is a famous analogy for breaking up big and daunting tasks into pieces and focusing on each part one by one. It’s usually useful -with the right level of motivation. Sometimes it’s the low level of motivation that makes us start tasks on the last night before a deadline and then we realize that “Oh well, we don’t have time to finish it so…”
2) Books are heavy. I’ve always dreamt of owning a personal home library, but to have a personal home library one has to first have a permanent home. So an obvious solution to the accumulating book problem is not the easiest for book lovers, but we have to do it anyway; DONATE. For those who don’t know what to do with their books in Abu Dhabi, there’s The Book Shelter in the Circle Cafe in Khalifa City A, and from what I understood they have a branch in Dubai.
So we understand how heavy books can be physically, but the information contained within them can be analogous to weights for your mind muscles. It’s true that sometimes you have to plow through a three-hundred page book to get one single idea, but then that idea could transform your life…over and over and over again.
So keep reading, and for those who keep on packing their lives into boxes every few years, get a kindle. It’s a good investment.
3) Cleanse, detox, declutter…. Whether it is donating clothes, or getting rid of expired items, packing is always a good time for dumping some things into boxes and then dumping the boxes out. The life lesson is obvious here, get rid of whatever it is that is not working for you anymore. Sometimes it’s a habit, other times it’s a toxic relationship…be efficient and be relentless.
4) Don’t look inside other people’s boxes. It’s easy for us to compare our lives with the lives of others, especially with social media around. But comparing your life with that of others only lowers your self-esteem and makes you doubt your choices. So instead of peeking at what other people have in their boxes (figuratively of course), just focus on yours. Focus on your own roles, your own relationships, your own life. I’ve written about this before; the only person worth competing with is yourself.
5) Celebrate the small wins. Once you’re done packing, sit back, make good use of one of those boxes and use it as an ottoman as you sit back and put your feet up.
6) Last but not least, just let go. Packing teaches us how little we really need to survive, to carry over from one stage to another. It makes us really distinguish between the needs and the wants, the essentials and inessentials. We realize we actually can live without things we used to think we cannot live without…all we had to do was actually get thrown into a situation to try.
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A Heart's Echoes 